There was a B earded Vulture, for example it shouldn’t be in this country, but it’s living very happily up in the north of England. M: I have been surprised-there have been incredible birds that appeared in Britain over the time of lockdown.

I want to be really honest, though, because people keep saying to me, 'Oh, you must be going out into the green world and getting solace.' There’s been a lot of that, but there’s also been a lot of action movies and ice cream.Ī: What are your birding routines right now? Everything’s really lovely, yet everything is going wrong.īut there are moments of joy. Friends, walks, birds, it’s all there. Outside my window there’s a barn, and a field that’s just been plowed after the harvest. Macdonald: It’s a really strange one, isn’t it? I’m living in this house in an idyllic, tiny, rural village in the east of England, in the county of Suffolk. But Macdonald also writes about boars, ants, fungi, deer, and those deeply human concerns of how our ways of being in nature will shape the planet-and us-in the years to come.Īudubon recently caught up with Macdonald by Zoom to discuss Vesper Flights, birding during lockdown, and what keeps her hopeful. Birds are present in this book, of course: sparrows, swifts, gulls, hawks. It is a collection of lyrical essays (some brand-new, others previously published) with a wide-ranging scope. Six years later, in the midst of this year’s pandemic and a summer teeming with climate-related catastrophes and social unrest, Macdonald came out with her second book, Vesper Flights. The intimate memoir was about Macdonald's journey to train a Northern Goshawk, an especially difficult hunting bird, while mourning the death of her father. When Helen Macdonald released her bestselling debut book, H is for Hawk, in 2014, she quickly became known as one of today's most vivid nature writers-not to mention a literary celebrity in the birding world.

Helen macdonald